Recording - March 2013 - 40

Last month I described a drum recording session at the Lamont School of
Music, University of Denver, where students in my Music Recording and
Production program set up multiple microphones in our cavernous orchestra rehearsal room. This month and next, I will tell you about our experiments with throwing together different mixes of this source material. We’ll
include a URL with Part 3 next month, that will have audio clips you can
download, and a Pro Tools Session file for you to play with as well. Let’s
get mixing!
Recap
I usually place drum overheads at a sufficient distance so that they pick
up just about everything in the kit. I then bring up the individual drum mics
to reinforce the sounds I am already hearing from the overheads. This
approach can yield a very realistic and almost three-dimensional drum
sound that makes you feel like you are in the room with the drummer. (This
can be a good or a bad thing depending on the personal hygiene habits
of the drummer...)
However, in this session we decided to go for a much more close-miked
approach because we wanted more freedom to tightly control and even
alter the sound of the drum set. To that end, we placed the overheads much
closer, really treating them just as cymbal mics. We selected figure-8 polar
patterns on the overhead mics and placed them in a way that resulted in

By Michael Schulze

very little leakage from the rest of the drum set. This extra isolation results
in a less realistic and “acoustic” sound, but gives the engineer the freedom
to alter reality a bit, panning and processing each drum as desired, unconstrained by the limitations of propriety or good taste.
After the session I started working on a real mix in ProTools. The first
thing I did, as I always do, is time-align the drum mics to the overheads,
even in a situation like this where leakage was minimal. All the close mics
were then routed to a stereo aux track and that track was further delayed
to match the arrival time at a spaced pair of cardioid condensers about 8
feet from the drum set. For more detail on that process check out my article
in last month’s issue, and for a more detailed demonstration of time-aligning check out our video Bass Guitar Part 3 at www.recordingmag.com (it’s
in the Resource Library under Videos).

Remedial eq
I advise my students to use equalization to attenuate (make quieter)
objectionable frequencies before they go boosting the good stuff. Once
everything was lined up I threw up all my faders to establish a rough mix.
This revealed a few very common problems.
Problem #1 was a bit too much of a timbale-type “boing” coming from
the mic on the top of the snare drum. I have heard this sound when my
snare mic is too close to the rim, but in this case my mic was in a good
place so I should have asked the drummer to damp the drum with a bit of
gaffer’s tape, a drum-damping ring, or a product such as MoonGels (those
little blobs of sticky goo I find on the floor of my drum room and used to
think were something rather disgusting before I knew what they were).
However, in the heat of battle I failed to ask the drummer, so I must now
“fix it in the mix”.
40

RECORDING March 2013

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Recording - March 2013

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